Watching the Proud Boys March in Portland on MAGA Livestream
Yesterday, August 17 2019, the Proud Boys and assorted affiliate right-wing types staged a march in Portland, Oregon. The event had been heavily pre-gamed in the media, with prophesies of violence, statements by protest and counter-protest leaders calling for non-violence, some pre-rally arrests, and, in the morning, a tweet from the president saying he was bullish on designating antifa as domestic terrorists.
I’m a big fan of watching history unfold as close to real-time and unmediated as I can get. I watched livestreams of Michael Brown’s body lying on the pavement, days before the resultant protests and police crackdown dominated the media. I watched the Charlottesville tiki torch parade live, that night, when it was somewhat of a guerrilla event compared with all the focus on the next day’s Unite the Right rally.
I’m also a fan of being a virtual embed in the opposing camp. The way to experience the actual mindset and worldview of people who are very different from you but whose perspectives dominate in the halls of power is through *events.*
In this spirit I watched the 2012 presidential election results on Fox, and got to see Karl Rove have a 10-alarm meltdown and argue with the network’s own statistics wonks. I watched the 2018 midterms on livestream hosted by Steve Bannon, and, by seeing him grapple with and frame the returns in real time, learned more about his thinking than any profile or op-ed had ever furnished. For the record, he truly knows his electoral politics. He was somewhat obsessed with the Virginia seat that Barbara Comstock lost that night, seeing it early as a bellweather loss.
So yesterday I fired up Periscope, used their map function to find livestreams in Portland, and browsed until I found a guy livestreaming behind enemy lines.
Now, my twitter feed was chockfull of Portland, but it was a lot of opinions and prognostications and ambient info. There were also livestreams available from the counter-protest, but most just stood at the police barricades and somewhat yearningly speculated about the Proud Boy contingent across the way.
This guy was MAGA-proud, Pepe-adjacent, and his stream was hashtagged with down-with-antifa-terrorist slogans. We joined the action as the right-wingers milled around a park, and coalesced to be led in prayer (Christian) that their cause was just and god was with them. The predominant fashion choice was american flag. American flags as capes, as standards, as onesies. The spontaneous chant was USA! USA! The participants were easily 90% men, more specifically at least 85% white men. They were more burly and swaggary than the Unite-the-Right guys, who had been on the whole thin and pasty-white under SWAT-nazi regalia. Think fewer fashy haircuts and more biker militia.
The streamer was a font of cutting-edge right-wing talking points. The agenda of this march was “a peaceful protest against antifa violence and for diversity and inclusion.” He emphasized diversity and inclusion like a SJW on steroids. Something something protecting Judeo-Christian values. Free speech under attack. He reminded us of the unprovoked attack on Andy Ngo, and the fact that Ngo is non-white is clearly a point of pride for the movement. (Puts me in mind of the celebrity status of Diamond and Silk.) At a later point he went on at length to claim that “antifa always goes after minorities,” citing several inside-baseball incidents. This is apparently a big gotcha on the right: that antifa are the real racists.
The right-wingers, when they’re not pumping up antifa as the greatest threat to free speech and truth and justice in history, generally find leftists laughable. There was a small group chanting “go home, Nazis!” and a larger group of Proud Boys mockingly chanting back “where are the Nazis?”
From a few dismissive asides it was clear that the rock-solid belief on this side is that liberals are like broken records, accusing everyone of being racist, accusing everyone of being Nazis, until the words are meaningless. Both the amplified speakers and my streaming host reiterated there were no Nazis, and the group was far from racist. The streamer’s smooth rhetoric revealed how cannily the right wing has co-opted leftist rhetoric and weaponized it against the left. Many times, if you closed your eyes, you could feel as though you were listening to an antifa stream railing about the violent ultra-right. It gets somewhat Escheresque. Add to that the delight this contingent has in trolling and accusing other people of “false flag” operations and you get a kaleidoscope of cosplay and bad faith.
Everyone milled around the park unfocused but expectant. It was frankly boring as hell. People were pleasant to one another, and a lot of people knew and greeted this streamer. Police loudspeakers blared warnings that violence would not be tolerated and arrests would be swift, and the assemblage cheered, taking it as a warning to antifa and not their peaceable patriot selves.
Then, movement. The Proud Boys et al. were to exit the park, marching across a bridge. It was still morning on the west coast, making this the shortest rally I’d ever witnessed. There hadn’t seemed to be any planned events or speaker lineup in the park.
As our streamer joined the march and energy ramped up with movement, he loosened up and spoke more authentically. He said that he traveled all over to “cover” these events (it is possible this is a major income stream for him) and that this very morning he had texted his wife to say he did it all for love of family and country, for her, and then segued into a pretty hardcore Christian reference to the lamb of God. That’s not my background but I think it may have a certain specific meaning to evangelicals, like washed in the blood of the lamb type of thing.
He then grew jubilant, dropping diversity and inclusion for a victory lap. “We came, we marched, we conquered!” Antifa was nowhere to be seen! They had triumphed! If they could march in left-wing Portland, why, they could march anywhere, no one could stop them! Even San Francisco, which is like 90% left-wingers, and look what happened to that city! (What had, remained unspecified, but my sense was for this audience something like “elite liberal shithole” might resonate. Interestingly, the Left also hates what’s happened to San Francisco, but more from a “libertarian techbro wasteland” perspective.)
Then he, with complete assurance, informed his audience that the FBI had announced that antifa from Oakland, of all places, had gone to Syria to train with Isis. Now, this is the good stuff; this is why I watch. What kind of alternate reality rabbit hole are these people living in? What media diet fed them this? [It’s from Ezra Klein’s 2017 book “All Out War: The Plot to Destroy Trump”; a book that made zero ripple of the left, but seems to be a smoking gun treasure trove for the right.]
The assembly arrived on the other side of the bridge. A compatriot excitedly informed our streamer of the “antifa kayaker” so we all went to the railing and looked down; sure enough, a lone kayaker. Our streamer said he looked like so and so (an antifa person known to them) and claimed he had “shot us the finger” although I’d have to take his word for it since the guy was the size of an ant on my screen. This was the highlight of the entire stream, this distant kayaker.
Then there was a hubbub and commotion and much movement and it seemed as though, stage right, back where we’d just come from, there might be an actual confrontation, the sort of action that, despite themselves, I sensed that everyone there was hoping for. But as we doubled back the police were already saying “retreat, retreat” and people around the streamer were saying it was just a shouting match, and possibly a one-on-one shove.
Now our streamer announces the plan is just to go back to buses and cars and go home. It was seriously only just around noon west coast time. The whole thing was a low-energy dud.
The stream ended minutes later. On Twitter I saw how leftists were framing things. Our streamer might sarcastically wonder “where are the Nazis” but on Twitter I saw posted a motorbike parked outside a bar with a black helmet dangling from the handlebars; the helmet featured a swastika on one side and the SS lightning bolt insignia on the other. Our streamer had rhapsodized about peace and inclusion on the bridge march, but photos on my twitter stream showed a plurality of the men throwing up the semi-ironic white power “OK” sign (it’s ok to be white! who could argue with that?!)
The real action of the day was in the post-rally citywide disperal and exodus. Events so localized and particulate and hyperbolically reported that they were disinformation-ed, optic-ed, and fact-checked simultaneously from all sides. Andy Ngo made an appearance, “reporting” on twitter that antifa was attacking bus riders with a hammer for no reason, and no police to stop them; that an antifa crowd had beat up a blameless guy and his young daughter, etc. It turned out the bus was some sort of Utah white nationalists’, that it was they who wielded the hammer until it was wrested from them, that the man and woman in her 20s are a father-daughter provocateur team who livestream their oppression at the hands of leftists on the reg.
No matter; tens of thousands of MAGA shared the images of antifa violence, and the true goal of the march was achieved.
Periscope Link, Matthew Prewett stream
